So one day in the near future, maybe 2 - 5 years out, when 1% - 5% of online transactions take place in Bitcoin, and 1% - 5% of the stock market has moved to Counterparty, I think it becomes obvious that pretty quickly it will no longer be feasible to run your own node that actually keeps the entire blockchain. Anyone have any thoughts on that ?
If so , what would it imply for xcp and the like?
Well it would imply that (which some might argue even now is the case) that running your own personal "HEAVY" wallet, would be infeasible, without commercial grade hardware and connection speeds.
I believe this might be where
Chris Odom's ideas come in with open transactions and trustless servers. We're going to have to get a little less decentralized but keep the trustless nature. I think its inevitable, unless we find some way to more efficiently store HUMONGOUS amounts of data, like petabytes...
EDIT: Similarly if you look back in time to the dawn of the internet (publicly usable) you may have been able to store every known website for a few years, imagine how much space the whole internet would take to store now on each node. While transaction data is tiny in comparison to large amounts of media related data, eventually you get enough TX data and it really doesn't matter.